Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

Also known as: How on earth did people write encyclopedias before the Internet? I’ve been a regular editor on Wikipedia for a while now, with a pretty narrow focus on the University of Virginia and related topics. In the process, I’ve found a list of sources that have made the topic much easier, and might [...]

I ran across an interesting concept in my reading today: technical debt, and its cousin design debt. The concept is basically the application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to software development. As you develop software, you affect the entropy of the code. Feature development typically increases entropy, while refactoring and explicit design activities decrease [...]

I’ve stopped reading Jakob Nielsen on a regular basis, so I missed this: Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes. As it turns out, this is one of the few of Jakob’s Alertboxes that I agree with more than disagree with. Iterative design, paper prototypes, decide what your app should do, beware nonstandard GUI controls, design for the user [...]

The big concert, that is, or concerts to be more precise. The last Tanglewood Festival Chorus concert series of the Symphony Hall part of our season is coming up, and it’s big: Hector Berlioz’s two part opera, Les Troyens. Everything about it is big: five acts divided into two nights, big chorus, big orchestra, big [...]

New York Times: Red Sox Top A’s, 6-5, in Tokyo Opener. For the curious, no, I did not get out of bed at 5:30 to watch the opener. I did, however, tune into the game on AM radio—something I haven’t ever used on my car before—on the way in to work, to hear that the [...]

It’s been a while since I wrote a food-oriented post—and of course a holiday weekend is just the thing to trigger one. Lisa’s parents were here this weekend, so our relatively freewheeling Easter dinner that we have honed over the past few years got expanded a little stylistically while reining in a few of the [...]

Happy Good Friday! In honor of the day when history turned upside down, here’s a keen little insight from the late Joseph Weizenbaum (via helmintholog, via Scott Rosenberg): some programmers are compulsive programmers who, in taking a purely software-centric approach to solving problems, set themselves up for failure and take the organizations in which they [...]

I was going to take a shot at ripping apart this Leander Kahney article in Wired magazine on how Apple is the anti-Google and therefore evil, but I figured if I waited long enough that John Gruber at Daring Fireball would do it for me. Gruber didn’t disappoint, noting that “by Kahney’s logic, any company [...]

A few comics related links this morning. First, it will be of interests to comics historians, fantasy fans, and my sister that the full archive of Elfquest is going on line for free to mark the comic’s thirtieth anniversary; the archive will fill up over the coming year. That’s a whole lotta Pini, folks. If [...]

Browsing a Wired.com photo feature on the Internet Archive’s book scanning operation, I was struck by this image, showing a self-contained book press. PDF goes in, paperback bound book comes out. I would pay for a copy of Cabell’s Early History of the University of Virginia, for sure, and maybe even the five-volume centennial History [...]

I’ve just read what I hope will be the first speech collected in Barack Obama’s presidential library, the prepared text of his address on race that he is giving right now in Philadelphia (New York Times liveblog). I don’t think I’ve heard any candidate in recent memory speak so cogently about problems with racial perspectives [...]

I was all set to post my favorite Irish-relevant Muppet sketch—Animal, the Swedish Chef, and Beaker singing “Danny Boy”—until the coffee kicked in and I remembered I had already done it. Ah well. If you’re in a maudlin mood, check out Eva Cassidy’s rendition.

It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this [...]

In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely [...]

I wasn’t able to attend this week’s SOURCE: Boston conference, which my company is cosponsoring, but reading about some of the talks and looking at some of the papers that are coming out of it has been fascinating. A few points: If you think protecting digital systems is hard, what about analog systems like the [...]